Aztec a-1

by Gary Jennings

  "This is all we lacked."

  At the palace, a half-dressed steward hurried me up the stairs to the upper floor, then up another staircase to the roof of the great building. Motecuzóma sat on a bench in his roof garden, and I think he was shivering, though the spring night was not cold and he was swathed in several mantles hastily flung around him. Without shifting his gaze from the sky, he said to me:

  "After the New Fire ceremony came the eclipse of the sun. Then the falling stars. Then the smoking stars. All those things of the past years were omens evil enough, but at least we knew them for what they were. This is an apparition never seen before."

  I said, "I beg to correct you, Lord Speaker—only that I may relieve your apprehensions to some degree. If you will wake your historians, my lord, and set them to searching the archives, they can ascertain that this has occurred before. In the year One Rabbit of the last preceding sheaf of years, during the reign of your namesake grandfather."

  He stared at me as if I had suddenly confessed to being some kind of sorcerer. "Sixty and six years ago? Long before you were born. How could you know of it?"

  "I remember my father telling of lights like these, my lord. He claimed it was the gods striding about the skies, but with only their mantles visible, all tinted in the same cold colors."

  And that is what the lights looked like that night: like filmy cloth draperies depending from a point at the top of the sky and hanging all the way down to the mountain horizon, and swaying and stirring as if in a light breeze. But there was no noticeable breeze, and the long curtains of light made no swishing sound as they swung. They merely glowed coldly, in colors of white and pale green and pale blue. As the draperies softly undulated, those colors subtly changed places and sometimes merged. It was a beautiful sight, but a sight to make one's hair similarly stir.

  Much later, I chanced to mention that night's spectacle to one of the Spanish boatmen, and told him how we Mexíca had interpreted it as a warning of dire things coming. He laughed and called me a superstitious savage. "We too saw the light that night," he said, "and we were mildly surprised to see it this far south. But I know it signifies nothing, for I have seen it on many nights when sailing in the cold northern oceans. It is a commonplace sight there in those seas chilled by Boreas, the north wind. Hence the name we call it, the Boreal Lights."

  But that night I knew only that the pale and lovely and fearsome lights were being seen in The One World for the first time in sixty and six years, and I told Motecuzóma, "According to my father, they were the omen that presaged the Hard Times back then."

  "Ah, yes." He nodded somberly. "The history of those starvation years I have read. But I think any bygone Hard Times will prove to have been negligible in comparison to what is now in store." He sat silent for a time, and I thought he was only moping, but suddenly he said, "Knight Mixtli, I wish you to undertake another journey."

  I protested as politely as I could, "My lord, I am an ageing man."

  "I will again provide carriers and escorts, and it is no rigorous trail from here to the Totonaca coast."

  I protested more strongly, "The first formal meeting between the Mexíca and the white Spaniards, my lord, should be entrusted to no lesser personages than the nobles of your Speaking Council."

  "Most of them are older than you are, and less fit for traveling. None of them has your facility at word picture accounts, or your knowledge of the strangers' tongue. Most important, Mixtli, you have some skill at picturing people as they really look. That is something we have not yet had, not since the outlanders first arrived in the Maya country—a good picture of them."

  I said, "If that is all my lord requires, I can still draw from memory the faces of those two I visited in Tihó, and do a passably recognizable portrayal."

  "No," said Motecuzóma. "You said yourself that they were only artisan commoners. I wish to see the face of their leader, the man Cortés."

  I ventured to say, "Has my lord then concluded that Cortés is a man?"

  He smiled wryly. "You have always disdained the notion that he might be a god. But there have been so many omens, so many coincidences. If he is not Quetzalcoatl, if his warriors are not the Toltéca returning, they could still have been sent by the gods. Perhaps as a retribution of some sort." I studied his face, rather corpse-looking in the greenish glow from above. I wondered if, when he spoke of retribution, he was thinking of his having snatched the throne of Texcóco from the Crown Prince Black Flower, or if he had other, private, secret sins in mind.

  But he suddenly drew himself up and said in his more usual tart manner, "That aspect of the matter need not concern you. Only bring me a portrait of Cortés, and word pictures numbering his forces, describing their mysterious weapons, showing the manner in which they fight, anything else that will help us know them better."

  I tried one last demurrer. "Whatever the man Cortés may be or may represent, my lord, I judge that he is no fool. He is not likely to let a spying scribe wander at will about his encampment, counting his warriors and their armory."

  "You will not go alone, but with many nobles, richly accoutered according to their station, and all of you will address the man Cortés as an equal noble. That will flatter him. And you will take a train of porters bearing rich gifts. That will allay his suspicions as to your real intent. You will be high emissaries from the Revered Speaker of the Mexíca and The One World, fitly greeting the emissaries of that King Carlos of Spain." He paused and gave me a look. "Every man of you will be an authentic and fully accredited lord of the Mexíca nobility."

  When I got home again, I found Béu also awake. After having watched the night sky's lights for some time, she was brewing chocolate for my return. I greeted her considerably more exuberantly than usual, "It has been quite a night, my Lady Waiting Moon."

  She obviously took that for an endearment, and looked both startled and delighted, for I do not believe I had ever in our married life spoken an endearment to her.

  "Why, Záa," she said, and blushed with pleasure. "If you were merely to call me 'wife' it would lift my heart. But—my lady? Why this sudden affection? Has something—?"

  "No, no, no," I interrupted. I had for too many years been satisfied with Béu's closed and contained demeanor; I did not want her suddenly gushing sentimentality. "I spoke with the prescribed formality. 'Lady' is now your entitled mode of address. This night the Revered Speaker awarded me the -tzin to my name, which confers it upon you as well."

  "Oh," she said, as if she would have preferred some other sort of benefaction. But she quickly reverted to her cool and unemotional former self. "I take it you are pleased, Záa."

  I laughed, somewhat ironically. "When I was young I dreamt of doing great deeds and earning great wealth and becoming a noble. Not until now, past my sheaf of years, am I Mixtzin, the Lord Mixtli of the Mexíca, and perhaps only briefly, Béu.... Perhaps only as long as there are lords, only as long as there are Mexíca—"

  There were four other nobles besides myself, and, since they had been born to their titles, they were not much pleased that Motecuzóma had set an upstart like me in command of the expedition and the mission we were charged to accomplish.

  "You are to lavish esteem, attention, and flattery on the man Cortés," said the Revered Speaker, giving us our instructions, "and on any others of his company you perceive to be of high rank. At every opportunity you will lay a feast for them. Your porters include capable cooks, and they carry ample supplies of our tastiest delicacies. The porters also carry many gifts, which you are to present with pomp and gravity, and say that Motecuzóma sends these things as a token of friendship and peace between our peoples." He paused to mutter, "Besides the other valuables, there should be enough gold there to assuage all their heart ailments."

  There certainly should, I thought. In addition to medallions and diadems and masks and costume adornments of solid gold—the most beautifully worked pieces from the personal collection of himself and prior Revered Speakers, many of th
em pieces of great antiquity and inimitable craftsmanship—Motecuzóma was even sending the massive disks, one of gold, one of silver, that had flanked his throne and served him for gongs of summons. There were also splendid feather mantles and headdresses, exquisitely carved emeralds, amber, turquoises, and other jewels, including an extravagant quantity of our holy jadestones.

  "But, above all things, do this," said Motecuzóma. "Discourage the white men from coming here, or even wanting to come here. If they seek only treasure, your gift of it may be sufficient to send them seeking in other nations there along the coast. If not, tell them the road to Tenochtítlan is hard and perilous, that they could never make the journey alive. If that fails, then tell them that your Uey-Tlatoani is too busy to receive them—or too aged or ill—or too unworthy to merit a visit by such distinguished personages. Tell them anything that will make them lose interest in Tenochtítlan."

  When we crossed the southern causeway and then turned east, I was leading a longer and richer and more heavily laden train than any pochtéatl ever had done. We skirted south of the unfriendly land of Texcala, and went by way of Chololan. There and in other cities, towns, and villages along the rest of our route, the anxious inhabitants pestered us with questions about the "white monsters" whom they knew to be disturbingly nearby, and about our plans for keeping them at a distance.

  When we rounded the base of the mighty volcano Citlaltepetl, we began to descend through the last of the mountainous country into the Hot Lands. On the morning of the day that would bring us clear to the coast, my fellow lords donned their splendiferous regalia of feather headdresses, mantles, and such, but I did not.

  I had decided to add a few refinements to our plans and instructions. For one reason, it had been eight years since I had learned what Spanish I knew, and that had hardly improved with disuse. I wanted to mingle with the Spaniards unobserved, and hear them talk their language, and absorb it, and possibly gain a bit more fluency before I attended any of the formal meetings between our lords and theirs. Also, I had spying and note taking to do, and I could do those tasks better if I was invisible.

  "So," I told the other nobles, "from here to the meeting ground I will go barefoot, and wear only a loincloth, and carry one of the lighter packs. You will lead the train, you will greet the outlanders, and when you make camp you will let our porters disperse and relax as they like. For one of them will be me, and I want freedom to wander. You will do the feasting and consultation with the white men. From time to time I will confer with you, privately, after dark. When we have jointly collected all the information the Revered Speaker requested, I will give the word and we will take our leave."

  * * *

  I am glad that you again join us, Lord Bishop, for I know you will wish to hear of the first real confrontation between your civilization and ours. Of course, Your Excellency will appreciate that many of the things I saw at that time were so new and exotic as to be baffling to me, and many of the things I heard sounded like monkey gibberish. But I will not prolong this account by repeating my ingenuous and often erroneous first impressions. I will not, as our earlier observers had done, speak foolishly of such things as the Spanish soldiers wearing the four legs of animals. The things I saw I will report in the light of my later and clearer understanding of them. The things I heard I will recount as I later construed them when I had a more perfect knowledge of your language.

  As a pretended porter, I could only infrequently and surreptitiously use my topaz for looking at things, but these were the things I saw first. As we had been told to expect, there was in the bay only one ship. It was some distance from shore, but it was obviously as big as a goodly house. Its wings were apparently furled, for there extended upward from its roof only some tall poles and a tangle of ropes. Here and there about the bay, similar poles stuck up from the water, where the other ships had sunk as they burned. On the beach of the bay, the white men had erected three markers to commemorate the spot where they had first stepped ashore. There was a very large cross made of heavy wooden timbers from one of the destroyed ships. There was a high flagstaff flying a tremendous banner, the colors of blood and gold, the colors of Spain. And there was a shorter flagstaff bearing a smaller flag, the personal ensign of Cortés, blue and white with a red cross in the center.

  The Place of Abundant Beautiful Things, which the white men had named the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, had sprouted quite a village. Some of the dwellings were only of cloth supported on sticks, but others were the typical coastal huts of cane walls and palm-leaf thatch, built for the visitors by their submissive Totonaca hosts. But that day there were not many white men in evidence—or their animals or their conscripted Totonaca laborers—for most of them, we learned, were working in a place some way farther north, where Cortés had decreed the construction of a more permanent Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, with solid houses of wood and stone and adobe.

  Our train's approach had of course been noted by sentries and reported to the Spaniards. So there was a small group of them waiting to greet us. Our party halted at a respectful distance and our four lords, as I had privately recommended to them, lighted censers of copali incense and began swinging them on their chains, making coils of blue smoke in the air about them. The white men assumed, then and long afterward—to this day, as far as I know—that the wafting of perfumed smoke was our traditional way of saluting distinguished strangers. It was really only our attempt to draw a defensive veil between us and the intolerable smell of those ever-unwashed strangers.

  Two of them came forward to meet our lords. I estimated them both to be of about thirty and five years of age. They were well dressed, in what I know now to have been velvet hats and cloaks, long-sleeved doublets and bulbous breeches made of merino, with thigh-high boots of leather. One of the men was taller than I, and broad and muscular, and most striking of appearance. He had a wealth of gold-colored hair and beard which flamed in the sunlight. He had bright blue eyes and, though his skin was of course pallid, his features were strong. The local Totonaca had already given him the name of their sun god, Tezcatlipóca, for his sunny appearance. We new arrivals naturally took him to be the white men's leader, but soon learned that he was only second in command, Pedro de Alvarado by name.

  The other man was rather shorter and much less prepossessing, with bandy legs and a pigeon chest like the prow of a canoe. His skin was even whiter than the other's, though he had black hair and beard. His eyes were as colorless and cold and distant as a winter sky of gray cloud. That unimpressive person was, he told us pompously, the Captain Don Hernán Cortés of Medellin in the Extremadura, more recently of Santiago de Cuba, and he was come here as representative of His Majesty Don Carlos, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain.

  At the time, as I have said, we could understand little of that lengthy title and introduction, although it was repeated for us in Xiu and Náhuatl by the two interpreters. They also had come toward us, walking a few paces behind Cortés and Alvarado. One was a white man, with a pockmarked face, dressed in the manner of their common soldiers. The other was a young woman of one of our own nations, clad in a maidenly yellow blouse and skirt, but her hair was an unnaturally reddish brown, almost as gaudy as Alvarado's. Of all the numerous native females presented to the Spaniards by the Tabascoob of Cupilco and more recently by Patzinca of the Totonaca, that one was the most admired by the Spanish soldiers, because her red hair was, they said, "like that of the whores of Santiago de Cuba."

  But I could recognize hair artificially reddened by a brew of achiyotl seeds, just as I could recognize both the man and the girl. He was that Jeronimo de Aguilar who had been a reluctant guest of the Xiu for the past eight years. Before touching at the Olméca lands and then here, Cortés had paused at Tihó and found and rescued the man. Aguilar's fellow castaway, Guerrero, after having infected all that Maya country with his small pocks, had died of them himself. The red-haired girl, though by then about twenty and three years old, was still small, still pretty, still
the slave Ce-Malinali whom I had met in Coatzacoalcos on my own way to Tihó, those eight years before.

  When Cortés spoke in Spanish, it was Aguilar who rendered the words into the labored Xiu he had learned during his captivity, and it was Ce-Malinali who translated that into our Náhuatl, and, when our emissary lords spoke, the process was reversed. It did not take me long to realize that the words of both the Mexíca and Spanish dignitaries were often being imperfectly rendered, and not always because of the cumbersome three-language system. However, I said nothing, and neither of the interpreters took notice of me among the porters, and I determined that they should not for a while yet.

  I stayed in attendance while the Mexíca lords ceremoniously presented the gifts we had brought from Motecuzóma. A gleam of avarice enlivened even the flat eyes of Cortés, as one porter after another laid down his burden and undid its wrappings—the great gold gong and the silver gong, the feather-work articles, the gems and jewelry. Cortés said to Alvarado, "Call the Flemish lapidary," and they were joined by another white man who evidently had come with the Spaniards for the sole purpose of evaluating the treasures that they might find in these lands. Whatever a Flemish is, he spoke Spanish, and, though his words were not translated for us, I caught the sense of most of them.

  He pronounced the gold and silver items to be of great worth, and likewise the pearls and opals and turquoise. The emeralds and jacinths and topazes and amethysts, he said, were even more valuable—above all, the emeralds—though he would have preferred them cut in facets instead of sculptured into miniature flowers and animals and such. The feather-work headdresses and mantles, he suggested, might have some curiosity value as museum pieces. The many gem-worked jadestones he contemptuously swept to one side, though Ce-Malinali tried to explain that their religious aspect made them the gifts most to be respected.